At Jantar Mantar, for the dogs

(From my occasional sharing of a few things I had only put on Instagram and/or FB earlier)

Jantar Mantar was buzzing on the afternoon of Jan 4: I was there for the events organised on behalf of community dogs, but there were other protests going on too - about the Ankita Bhandari murder case and the US attack on Venezuela - and the many rousing speeches, made just a few dozen meters apart, often overlapped with each other. (I shared a video on my Instagram page.)

At the animals protest, some heartening and sensible things were said by Manavi Rai, Gauri Maulekhi, Ambika Shukla, Anjali Gopalan, Navtej Johar and others - all of whom do an incredible amount for community animals in their respective spheres. Others on the stage included a 10-year-old boy who feeds at the NSD campus; a woman who feeds at Jamia; others who have been assaulted/beaten up for standing up for animals.

The speeches ranged, as one would expect, from the no-holds-barred, angry ones that directly took on the venom of BJP governments across the country (with Rekha Gupta and cohort described as no different from Aurangzeb in terms of tyranny) to the quieter, more circumspect ones: Anjali Gopalan spoke of the need for “animal-lovers” to move out of their own silos and to form larger coalitions with other marginalised groups - Dalits, housing society groups, LGBTQ groups etc. Navtej Johar said the ABC of Animal Birth Control should be modified to ABCWL (ABC With Love, something that the authorities haven’t come close to managing in the past). Scientific arguments were laid out, historical context for human-animal coexistence was discussed. There were some musical performances. And cautious optimism about what is to come on January 7 and afterwards… 

P.S. Of course, nothing to be particularly optimistic about happened at the hearings from Jan 7, extending till Jan 20, except that animal-carers, who had already made payments earlier to be allowed to present their cases to the SC, were finally given some sort of hearing; with the judges of course regularly interrupting with sarcastic or uninformed remarks. The fight, such, as it is continues - and meanwhile, with everything in limbo, there are plenty of reports from around the country, Telengana especially, of dogs being taken away and killed en masse.